> Additionally, you may also find that not all the little problems are worth solving, and what’s more interesting are the bigger problems around product-market fit, usability, and revenue.
TFA author (and me), and you have wildly different motivations. I don't know the author, but have said verbatim much of what they wrote, so I feel like I can speak on this.
Beyond the fact that I recognize the company has to continue exist for me to be employed, none of those hold the slightest bit of interest for me. What motivates me are interesting technical challenges, full stop. As an example, recently at my job we had a forced AI-Only week, where everyone had to use Claude Code, zero manual coding. This was agony to me, because I could see it making mistakes that I could fix in seconds, but instead I had to try to patiently explain what I needed to be done, and then twiddle my thumbs while cheerful nonsense words danced around the screen. One of the things I produced from that was a series of linters to catch sub-optimal schema decisions in PRs. This was praised, but I got absolutely no joy from it, because I didn't write it. I have written linters that parse code using its AST before, and those did bring me joy, because it was an interesting technical challenge. Instead, all I did was (partially) solve a human challenge; to me, that's just frustration manifest, because in my mind if you don't know how to use a DB, you shouldn't be allowed to use the DB (in prod - you have to learn, obviously).
I am fully aware that this is largely incompatible with most workplaces, and that my expectations are unrealistic, but that doesn't change the fact that it is how I feel.